Atlassian bets big on Ops with Jira Ops and OpsGenie acquisition

The Atlassian Summit is behind us but now’s the perfect time for an overview of the most important announcements. Although DevOps is all about collaboration, it’s not always easy to put theory into practice. We’re definitely glad to see that Atlassian is giving Ops the attention it deserves.

The rise of Ops

DevOps is all about collaboration but it’s not always easy to put theory into practice. In reality, even though it produces great results, “collaboration comes at a price,” according to Matthew Skelton, Head of Consulting at Conflux. What goes into a good team structure? Should we deliberately introduce some sort of boundary between teams to make sure one does not overpower the other? The answer is more nuanced than that. Case in point:

DevOps doesn’t have to turn into a fight for supremacy. If you follow these key conditions, your team should be able to play nicely, according to an Accenture blog post published a few years ago.

Goal definition is the first step en route to team collaboration.

One team approach is needed to build and inspire trust and mutual respect in your teams.

Diversity is key. Once you succeed in developing a closely knit team, the next step is to build sensitivity around diversity as the teams have professionals from different regions and cultures.

A clear roadmap defines your path to achieving the objectives. Outline everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and how each team member’s work fits into the bigger picture.

Earlier this year, we invited a few DevOps influencers to clear things up for you. Here are some highlights:

Ops isn’t going away, but ops increasingly lives on the other side of an API, instead of sitting next to you at work.

-Charity Majors

Operators are just as much developers as the developers, but they work on a different codebase. Developers are operating, and operators are developing; that’s DevOps.

-John Arundel

From our experience, we’d say developers have taken the driver’s seat position in DevOps. Might be a natural consequence due to the fact the operators often are that busy with keeping things alive, or with firefighting whereas a developer’s mindset might be more open to the new things.

Jira Ops

Jira Ops is a brand new product from Atlassian. It’s advertised as a better way for software and IT teams to manage incidents. It has built-in integrations with a lot of incident tools (Statuspage, OpsGenie, and PagerDuty, to name a few) and it’s extremely helpful if you want to respond, resolve and learn from every incident in an efficient and painless way.

The best part about it? They are offering it for free as an early access product until early 2019 when they plan to release a 1.0. Jira Ops is currently available for cloud; this way it’s always available, even if all your internal systems go down.

However, you should understand that software alone will only get you so far; if you want to learn more about the process of incident management, make sure to read Atlassian’s internal incident management handbook. If you’re on a development or operations team that looks after internet services for customers who require 24/7 availability, this handbook is for you.

OpsGenie

But Jira Ops is not the only good news for Ops; Atlassian announced that they have entered into an agreement to acquireOpsGenie, a leader in incident alerting. Jira Ops and OpsGenie, together with Atlassian Statuspage, which now offers deep integrations with Jira Ops, joined forces to create a powerful platform that helps you respond to and resolve incidents faster.

Gabriela Motroc is editor of JAXenter.com and JAX Magazine. Before working at Software & Support Media Group, she studied International Communication Management at the Hague University of Applied Sciences.